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Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Has Britain's Turner Prize for contemporary art jumped the shark?..........

I knew Duncan Campbell would win this year's Turner Prize. The Glasgow-based Irish filmmaker was the oldest of the four contenders. The work of the other three nominees, while not without interest, hadn't matured to stand up to his. That said, I couldn't bearIt For Others, Campbell's drab, 54-minute "Marxist" examination ofLes Statues Meurent Aussi, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's 1953 film essay on African sculpture and colonialism.

Campbell's po-faced talking down to his audience is just the kind of thing that gives Leftist dialectics a bad name; almost more so than their influence on brutal totalitarian regimes. Even by the standards of our age of appropriation, when works of art cannibalise each other as a matter of course, everything about this film feels dated and second-hand. The earnest "reflexivity" of the narration, which constantly draws attention to its modes of discourse; the smug female voice-over artist, who bizarrely mispronounces the numerous French words; the use of another medium – in this case, dance – to create a kind of abstract demonstration of the film's content, these things all hark weirdly back to the "materialist" theory that influenced art school teaching in the 1990s, and further back to the frequently soul-destroying "deconstructed narrative" cinema of the late '70s and early '80s. Is this really where the cutting edge of British art is at?

Quite apart from the matter of whether art galleries are the best places to show 54-minute films (what are cinemas for?), Campbell's win puts yet another question mark over the future of the Turner Prize.

David Shrigley, with I'm Dead, a taxidermied Jack Russell dog, was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2013.

There was a long moment, reaching a peak nearly 20 years ago, with Damien Hirst's win, when the very mention of the Turner Prize was guaranteed to arouse a tirade of splenetic indignation and/or a howl of dismissive laughter in even the most mild-mannered of people; a tirade that would lead, almost inevitably, into a litany of the most risible winning works to date: "unmade bed??? dead shark??? lights going on and off???".

The announcement of the winner of the country's most important art prize was an annual festival of derision, a televised, tabloid-fuelled saturnalia of righteous indignation; an event everybody loved. Those who hated the Turner Prize and all it stood for gained immense satisfaction from their loathing. There are few states more pleasurable than the absolute certainty you are being conned, that what you are looking at is not art, that your nursery age child and quite a few of your domestic pets could do equally well. Shouting these facts at an unresponsive television simply compounds the enjoyment.

There was something Hogarthian about the mixture of scurrilousness and moralising that went on, and about the sheer universality of that response. From the aristocrat to the beggar, via the banker, the taxi driver and the Middle English housewife, everyone had an opinion. Few things united the nation like the Turner Prize.

Tracey Emin sits on her iconic art installation, My Bed, which was short-listed for the 1999 Turner Prize.

The artists, curators and dealers who were the objects of this scorn loved it, of course. Nothing succeeds like attention. The only people who genuinely didn't like the Turner Prize were contemporary artists who didn't get nominated.

However, nowadays, a mention of the latest list of Turner Prize nominees arouses barely a flicker of interest from even the most hardened anti-modernist. The last Turner Prize really to impact on the public consciousness came in 2005, when it was won by Simon Starling's Shedboatshed: a German shed that was turned into a boat, sailed to the gallery, and then re-erected as a shed. Even then the prize was considered some way past its peak.

In every subsequent year, the media has made attempts to arouse some of the old excitement, with descriptions of the "outlandish" works produced by nominees, such as James Richards' slides of pornographic photographs, from which the genitals have been sandpapered by a Japanese librarian. If that sounds pretty wacky, the response from the British public has been near total indifference.

Simon Starling won the 2005 Turner Prize with Shedboatshed.

So what has happened to this great British institution?

Partly, it's the quality of the art and the artists themselves. I was never a great fan of the YBAs – the so-called Young British Artists – whose rise coincided with the glory days of the Turner Prize, but, at least, there was some personality there, and a few larger-than-life characters. Tracey Emin has always been a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but she has the courage of her daffiness and self-obsession. Hirst is, essentially, a used car dealer from Leeds – or he certainly is in spirit – but he's got charisma. Love them or loathe them, Emin's "unmade bed" and Hirst's "dead shark" and, to a slightly lesser degree, Martin Creed's "lights going on and off" (none of the works had these actual titles) went down in British folklore.

In contrast, the short-lists of the past few years have had a grey and worthy anonymity, typified by Campbell's studied academic approach. Despite the presence of a few colourful characters, such as deadpan one-liner merchant David Shrigley, recent short-lists have done nothing to dispel the impression that, nowadays, contemporary art is just a profession like any other, and no more inherently revolutionary than, say, quantity surveying.

Damien Hirst, who won the Turner Prize in 1995, poses with his 1999 work, The immortal.

The real problem is that its cover – of being so-called "cutting edge" – has been blown. In 1989, when Hirst staged Freeze – the exhibition that launched the YBA phenomenon and the sort of art that became synonymous with the Turner Prize – there was no cutting edge in British art. Or, rather, there was, but virtually nobody outside the art world knew about it.

The YBAs took the late 20th century avant garde – which had previously only seen tiny audiences – repackaged it with rock'n'roll attitude and booted it to the tabloids, which responded obligingly. The YBAs projected this charade onto a mass-media platform, turning artists into folk heroes, and attracting bigger, younger audiences to galleries such as Tate Modern. The Turner Prize awards ceremony then provided the ideal TV showcase.

As a result, the audience for art in general, and for difficult, experimental art in particular, has hugely expanded since the Turner Prize's mid-1990s heyday. You may not like the idea that whatever the artist says is art is art, but that is effectively the fact of the matter. Young people, of the sort who will be running the country in 10 or so years, don't think of a dead shark in an art gallery as way-out. It's simply stuff that you do or don't like.

The Turner Prize has been a victim of its own success. The things it was created to do have now been done. So what is to be done with this albatross of an institution?

One way dramatically to alter the character of the prize would be to change the selection process, taking it out of the hands of the Tate-appointed judges and their selectors, who are the kind of art world insiders who are only interested in impressing other art world insiders.

Instead, give it to Art Fund, a very different organisation with a much broader agenda. That would allow the Turner Prize genuinely to reflect the vast diversity of art being produced in Britain today. Because one thing is for sure: something has to change.